| A modern computer executes billions of instructions per second and stores billions of data bytes. | You need a system developer who can make each instruction and each byte correct. |
Why Use a Small Firm?
How We Do Business
Documentation Services
Support Services
Development Services
Contact Us
BGTask LLC documents, supports, and builds computer software and systems, emphasizing Microsoft Windows applications. This page describes our services.
We suggest that you use our services because we are cheaper, can often do better work, and free up your employees and your cash flow.
When you solicit IT work from large companies, you are paying for marketing and sales specialists, very high billing rates, and other corporate overhead. When you retain BGTask LLC, you work with one person who is able to define, manage, do, and deliver the work. For small and medium-sized projects we can do your work at much lower cost.
We can often do better work than a corporate team. Having one skilled worker design, develop, and document a solution maximizes the conceptual integrity and the consistency of that solution. Having a very experienced worker do all phases of a job can produce better results than a corporate team that pushes key detail work into the hands of junior associates.
We often take on software documentation and maintenance tasks that are not exciting for your own staff. By retaining us you free up your employees for more interesting work, such as developing major new systems. We free up your cash flow, because you normally only pay us after we deliver agreed results.
Our initial consultation, defining the scope of your work, and entering into an overall contract are normally free.
We prefer fixed-price work, with individual work orders subject to an overall contract, and payment only after delivering agreed results. We can also bill by the hour in particular circumstances, such as open-ended support work where you do not want to create work orders for individual deliverables.
When producing new documentation or new software on a fixed-price basis, we provide a free one-year warranty.
When you work with us on a fixed-price basis, then setting up a developer workstation, learning new tools, and fixing problems under warranty do not increase your costs.
When we expect to deliver multiple billable results in a month, we will normally bill you monthly, with payment due within 30 days.
We can work on your premises, with your equipment or with ours, or work on our own premises. We smoothly integrate with your development standards and procedures. If you do not have some needed standards and procedures, we can help you create them.
We may use subcontractors to deal with particular technical issues, but only with your prior approval. We always retain responsibility for the quality of our results.
The lowest-cost way to improve your systems may be with documentation. We can document your data elements and structures, your code classes and functions, and your user interfaces and business processes.
A data dictionary can document all data elements in an application, database, or enterprise. We can document all tables and other data containers and all relevant attributes of each data element. Such attributes can include container, name, type, meaning, units, source, nullability, length, character set, representation or encoding, range or allowed values, regular expression constraints, row-level constraints that involve multiple elements, indexes and index constraints, foreign key constraints, and sort order. We can provide a similar level of detail in code comments describing data inside your source code.
Good function documentation includes a brief, usually one-sentence, summary of what the function does; descriptions of the parameters passed in and out; any preconditions that must be met for the function to succeed; any postconditions established by the function; and a list of errors that can be thrown or returned by the function. Side effects, locking or transactional behavior, resource allocation or deallocation, any thread safety issues, and any memory overwrite potential should be indicated.
Class documentation should indicate class relationships, related functions (get and set for example), and any relevant state transitions. For example, a database connection object may need to be in an opened state for a DB command function to succeed.
User documentation should avoid IT terms and describe using the system with the user's vocabulary and in terms of the user's tasks. For example, the fact that your system is a three-tier system with a middle tier made up of multithreaded 32-bit dynamic link libraries is probably not relevant to your users.
We can extend the life and improve the capabilities of your existing custom applications. We can analyze and fix bugs, design and build enhancements, and query or clean up your data. If you do not already have coding standards, source code control, or a systematic build/test/deploy process, we can put these best practices in place. Supporting your existing applications often costs less and risks less than completely rewriting or replacing those applications.
For 12 years, supporting existing custom applications has been a major part of our work. We have diagnosed and fixed thousands of bugs in dozens of custom systems. We have implemented dozens of system enhancements, ranging in size from a few thousand dollars to more than one million dollars. We have written thousands of SQL queries to analyze or clean up data.
We build new custom Windows applications to meet your custom requirements. In the design phase, we identify your application's scope, requirements, and data model. In the develop phase, we create all needed custom code, data, documentation, and unit tests. In the deliver phase, your users test the application, we train your users and developers, and we deploy the application. In the support phase, we provide free support for the first year and low-cost support thereafter. Your company receives all source code and supporting documentation for the custom application, allowing you to enhance and support it yourselves as needed.
Depending on your Windows applications requirements, we may recommend a console (command-line) application, a one-tier application with a graphical user interface, or a two-tier application using a SQL Server database and GUI clients. We can build three-tier applications if needed, but two-tier applications will often be simpler and lower cost while still meeting your requirements. Microsoft .NET and Microsoft SQL Server are our current preferred development tools.
We have built simple web applications but are not currently qualified to build complex or high-security web applications.
BGTask LLC
545 Broadway #31
Denver, CO 80203
MartinLBuchanan@gmail.com